{"id":4128,"date":"2014-03-11T00:22:55","date_gmt":"2014-03-10T23:22:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/?p=4128"},"modified":"2015-01-30T23:48:18","modified_gmt":"2015-01-30T22:48:18","slug":"tonite-lets-all-make-love-in-london","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/2014\/03\/11\/tonite-lets-all-make-love-in-london\/","title":{"rendered":"Tonite Let\u2019s All Make Love in London"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Tonite<\/a>
Tonite Let\u2019s All Make Love in London<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

\nFormat:<\/B> YouTube

\nDirector:<\/B> Peter Whitehead

\nUK 1967

\n70 mins\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Colours swirl on the screen, blurry footage of the capital\u2019s signifiers swim into view, London buses and the like, as The Pink Floyd chug into \u2018Interstellar Overdrive\u2019 on the soundtrack, the one that sounds a bit like the theme to Steptoe and Son<\/i>. We get the title, and then the subtitle, \u2018a pop concerto,\u2019 as a montage takes shape of magazine covers, straplines and hemlines, union jacks on everything: welcome to cool Britannia. Tonite<\/i> is a definite case of the right filmmaker at the right time.<\/p>\n

Photographer-director-editor Peter Whitehead was a well-connected hipster and his hour-long documentary, released in 1967, catches the British Pop wave at its mod zenith, just before things got a bit more… hairy<\/i>. So we get interviews with Mick Jagger, Michael Caine and David Hockney, Edna O\u2019Brien and Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave singing \u2018Guantanamera\u2019 in Cuban sympathy, the Ginsberg poem that gives the film its title, performances from the Animals and Floyd and Alan Aldridge painting on a naked dolly bird to keep the investors and the raincoat brigade happy, all tossed lightly together in labelled sections (\u2018The loss of the British empire\u2019, \u2018It\u2019s all pop music\u2019, etc.) on a bed of skilfully assembled observational footage. Whitehead has an eye for the arresting image and a talent for sly juxtapositions in the editing suite; in the section on \u2018dolly girls\u2019 we see a pair of nuns touring the fashion boutiques, and he plays the Stones\u2019 fragile, chivalric ballad \u2018Lady Jane\u2019 over footage of alarmingly aggressive female stage invaders at a near riotous 1966 concert.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting that here, at the height of it all, most of his interviewees are sceptical about London\u2019s elevation to the kingdom of kool. Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham seems to be a portrait of louche disinterest behind yellow-tinted shades, hinting that his part in pop music will be over and he might move into film \u2013 he and Aldridge are pretty circumspect about what they do and its cultural worth. Christie opines that \u2018a good time is much easier to have now\u2019 but wonders whether that\u2019s for a minority, a bubble she\u2019s very much part of: \u2018everything\u2019s happened to me, I haven\u2019t happened to anything\u2019. It\u2019s telling that both Hockney and Caine bring up the British licensing hours. Caine calls them a \u2018condescending piece of class consciousness\u2019 brought in for the First World War to keep the workers in their place. Both bemoan the fact that the average bloke has to call it a night at 11 o\u2019clock and that the capital\u2019s nightclubs are too pricey for the masses. Hockney witheringly describes one as a \u2018rhythm and blues Aberdeen steakhouse\u2019 and dolefully laments that you would be unlikely to find a plumber from Camberwell in any of them. <\/p>\n

Money turns up over and over again, as freedom, as the reason people have the time to attend Vietnam protests. There is much here to confirm the suspicion that swinging London actually swung for very few, and that, as ever, it helped to be rich. Asked about \u2018pop art seduction\u2019 Caine says that \u2018it helps to be a movie star, or a pop star, or at the very least among the first 200 people on the Aldermaston march,\u2019 which is pretty damn cutting. It\u2019s left to the yanks to be wholly enthusiastic in the last reel. Lee Marvin (!) calls the pop explosion \u2018a healthy break away from the stoic, the stolid and the staid,\u2019* Hugh Hefner just seems delighted that there\u2019s somewhere to put on one of his Playboy clubs, where you can be surrounded by \u2018recognisable people\u2019.<\/p>\n

On the whole it\u2019s a great document, freely available on YouTube and well worth an hour of your time. It\u2019s too smart to attempt to be a definitive document of the times, and is much more of a freewheeling impressionistic grab bag of moments, people, styles and music, a cousin to the Mondo<\/i> movie. Still, it\u2019s artfully constructed and there\u2019s plenty here to chew on. \u2018It\u2019s all about the loss of the British empire,\u2019 says Caine at the outset, as we see footage of a a phalanx of bowler-hatted old-school-tie types observing the trooping of the colour or some other such piece of pomp and ceremony, with the implication that the days of royalty and deference may be numbered. Forty-odd years later social mobility seems to be backsliding and the Eton boys are firmly in charge. Plus ça change<\/i>, or \u2018meet the new boss, same as the old boss,\u2019 as The Who would have it. Toodle pip.<\/p>\n

Mark Stafford<\/B><\/I><\/p>\n

* He later says, \u2018there\u2019s more room in a Mini car than there is in a Cadillac, I don\u2019t know if that holds true for the miniskirts,\u2019 which makes me want to seek out more Lee Marvin interviews. Here, he seems to be in costume for the shooting of The Dirty Dozen<\/i>. <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Whitehead\u2019s 1967 hour-long documentary catches the British Pop wave at its mod zenith, just before things got a bit more… hairy<\/i>.
\nReview by Mark Stafford<\/B><\/I><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[794,793,282,798,802,801,800,607,799,795,796,797,792],"class_list":["post-4128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-check-it-out","tag-1960s-film","tag-1960s-london","tag-counter-culture","tag-david-hockney","tag-film-and-fashion","tag-film-and-music","tag-julie-christie","tag-lee-marvin","tag-michael-caine","tag-peter-whitehead","tag-pink-floyd","tag-rolling-stones","tag-swinging-london"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","wps_subtitle":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/purUP-14A","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":649,"url":"http:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/2009\/06\/04\/london-in-the-raw-primitive-london\/","url_meta":{"origin":4128,"position":0},"title":"LONDON IN THE RAW + PRIMITIVE LONDON","author":"VirginieSelavy","date":"June 4, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"The BFI's new Flipside strand unearths overlooked and obscure British films, but the almost-swinging 1960s presented in London in the Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965) is a version of the myth we know well already. 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